In private, Jimmy and Dupuy were quite informal with each other. All hierarchy was forgotten.
“He’ll be hanged, then?” asked Dupuy.
“No,” said Jimmy, casting his gaze out over the embers of the battle. “Philip has already poured twenty million into this siege. Having his chief engineer killed would be too much. But — and you have my word on this — that man will never cross the Pyrenees again. He’ll have to make do serving the maniac they’ve put on the throne in Madrid. Torment enough.”
Words that condemned Verboom. Jimmy himself didn’t know the extremes of cruelty his sentence would lead to. Thus, the Antwerp butcher, who had always sought to be beloved of his superiors and adored by the soldiery, spent the rest of his days miserably seeking the protection of a mad king against the rank and file, who thought of engineers as bricklayers and meddlers. This was his reward. Well, also, I later went after him and killed him — oh, I’ve already said?
Dupuy looked over Verboom’s (my) plans, smiling and shaking his head.
“What are you smiling at?” said Jimmy scaldingly. “We’ve had a hiding, and you look as though you couldn’t be happier.”
Still looking at the paper, Dupuy said: “He was educated by my cousin. What did you expect?”
Jimmy exploded. “I expected that you would alter all the stunts hidden in that trench!”
“And I would have,” said Dupuy, “if you’d given me time. In that, Verboom was right: A little self-restraint wouldn’t have gone amiss in you. But Martí knew that was the one thing you’d lack, that you’d want a swift victory. Again Vauban trumps Coehoorn. And now we have only two options: Either we suspend the trench works, accepting that defeat as well, or we push on and correct the errors that have been made. And you know very well the lives that will cost.” Again he tossed down the plans. “This is no trench, it’s a labyrinth.”
“No,” said Jimmy, giving voice to his thoughts. “It’s a knot.”
Jimmy elected to take an ax to it, like the Gordian knot it was. This was Jimmy to a T. He’d been overhasty in unleashing the assault, spurred on both by his Coehoornian spirit and by political expedience. But he was prepared to rectify the situation. Vauban? Coehoorn? In this instance, he was going to follow neither.
He lined up over a hundred cannons to crush any and every stone that lay in his way. His idea, doing away with any semblance of the art of siege warfare, consisted of flattening what was left of Barcelona’s ramparts and bastions, paving the way for the Army of the Two Crowns to march in in battle formation, as in a battle in open country. It would take longer than the initial forecast, but did Jimmy mind that? He had all the time in the world. Saint Clara prompted him to renounce his designs on the throne of England. His place was in London, vying to be king, and yet here he was, his future in ruins because of a city that refused to play along.
There was nothing to be done in the face of such an onslaught; the principles of engineering became meaningless. It was the first time I saw Costa, our stoical parsley-chewing chief of artillery, lose hope. We ran into each other one day, and hunkering down as the walls detonated around us, he grabbed hold of my sleeve, imploring and accusatory, and bellowed in my ear: “I swore I’d hold them off as long as we were three against five. Now they’ve got nine cannons to every one of ours! For the love of God, what more do you want from us?”
I extricated myself without giving an answer. The Mallorcans carried on working miracles to the end. They’d fire their mortars and, before the enemy had time to pinpoint where the shots were coming from, change position before taking aim once more. They destroyed several Bourbon cannons daily. The shells would go off on the French and Spanish gunners’ toes, making a hash of their bodies and lifting the cannons themselves to Babelian heights.
How grand, how majestic a sight: that of heavy artillery tossed in the air! We saw ten-foot iron or bronze barrels twirl through the sky, along with their crews. We saw parabolas of gun carriages lovelier than Jacob’s wheel. Up on his balcony, watching with his telescope, being the aesthete he was, Jimmy couldn’t have cared less whether they came to land on the broken-down farmhouses of Catalonia, or if they ended up lodged in the sun over France.
And yet, and yet, in the end the skill of the Mallorcans would all be for naught. The Bourbons had inexhaustible resources, of machinery as much as of men. Whereas every one of the Mallorcan gunners we lost was irreplaceable. They were peculiar folk, the Mallorcans, and never said a single word about their dead.
Jimmy resorting to that firestorm took the situation one step closer to the absurd. The siege was no longer a duel between thinking minds but, rather, a steady stream of devastation. I received the order from Don Antonio to withdraw from the front line, and he was quite right: The enemy’s new strategy rendered any technical course of action useless. We had gone beyond the civilized and rational. “Perfection can be reached only by going beyond the merely human dimension,” Don Antonio had said. Certainly Jimmy’s approach, all powerful and at the same time atavistic, destructive, and simply berserk, was dragging the situation beyond all limits. And here is a thing worthy of note: On the first day I was away from the point of attack, I felt a sickness settle on me, as though I were in need of the pain that had been racking me.
So, being of no use to those battered ramparts, I moved back inside the city. We hadn’t checked in on the enemy’s mining endeavors for a long time. I’d always had a strong dislike for mines. Vauban had no truck with them, and whether we want to or not, we take on the likes and dislikes of our teachers. The marquis saw mines as decoys and therefore ungentlemanly. According to him, the enemy must be beaten head-on; underhand tactics were not acceptable. On top of which, to a mind as supremely rational as his, a moyen si incertain was intolerable.
Mines have their fair share of proponents. Should the besieging army succeed in drilling a tunnel underneath the enemy walls and packing it with explosives, the battlements will fall — by surprise, and avoiding all risks. The hardships usually associated with a siege, over in an instant. And in a thundering, apocalyptic manner — not subject to appeal. I’ve known Maganons who dreamed of packing fifty thousand pounds of explosives into a mine. Proof that even the most exact science can go overboard; were they looking to blow the walls or the entire city, or what?
You can understand the fervor of those who argue for mines. A mine is employed with the certainty of saving time and lives. In practice, and according to what I’ve seen, this is never the case. Drilling a subterranean tunnel consumes all manner of resources, and without fail, some of those must be taken from the Attack Trench works; in an effort to save time, you only cause delays. Then there is the fact that the besieged will take their own measures. As Vauban put it: on the road to glory, there are no shortcuts.
There was one other reason why Longlegs Zuvi loathed mines. That reason being, of all the ways humans have devised to end one another’s lives, there are none more sinister or terrifying than underground combat.
You’d smell miners before you saw them. They spent such long periods underground that their skin gave off a warm stench; you didn’t need your senses honed in Bazoches to detect them. They were known as Los Cucs —The Worms. What was their brigade leader called? Buggered if I can recall.
Los Cucs hadn’t had much success. We knew the enemy was working on a large mine and that it was aiming between Saint Clara and Portal Nou. Knowing Jimmy, if they did reach their destination, the explosion would make that of the night of August 15 seem like a tiny spark off a flint. I asked to be brought up to speed by the captain of Los Cucs . What was his name? Strange, the things we forget. His men looked haggard and hollow-eyed, and to be presented with reinforcements was a great lift to them.
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